Sky Views: We need better powers to stop data bamboozling voters

Rowland Manthorpe, technology correspondent

Late last year, a researcher working for digital agency 89up contacted me about a mystery. It concerned the online presence of Labour Leave, the left-wing Brexit campaign formed in the run-up to the 2016 EU referendum.

The researcher had used the publicly-accessible WHOIS registry to look up the ownership records of the official Labour Leave campaign website, LabourLeave.org. And that was where they found the mystery.

LabourLeave.org was registered to a designer working for Rock Services, one of the many companies owned by Brexiteer businessman Arron Banks.

This was curious, to say the least. Mr Banks, famously, became the largest political donor in British history when he loaned £8m to the Brexit campaign in 2016. He also loaned staff from his companies to the Leave.EU campaign. Did he have members of his team working for Labour Leave? If so, what did they do? For how long? And for how much?

Image:Mr Mills was surprised to learn his old website was registered to someone with a Rock Services email address

To find out more, I got in touch with John Mills, chair of Labour Leave. First, though, I checked with the Electoral Commission to see if Labour Leave or Leave.EU had filed any receipts of joint working.

This was important for legal reasons. Under the rules governing British referendums, if two campaigns work together, they both need to declare the spending.

One campaign - let's call it Brexit A - can't put on a rally with its partner-in-arms, Brexit B, then declare the spending in the name of Brexit A only. Both campaigns have to add the cost of the rally to their spending total, which is strictly limited, with fines for exceeding it (more on those fines later).

Until 2016, this "common plan" clause was familiar only to electoral lawyers. Then came the EU referendum. Since then, it has emerged that Vote Leave broke electoral law by funnelling £675,315 through Brexit youth group BeLeave.

Other campaigns on both sides were investigated for the same offence. For a while after the referendum, it seemed as if illicit collaboration was everywhere.

Had Labour Leave and Leave.EU declared any receipts under a common plan? No, the Electoral Commission told me, they had not.

But when I spoke to Mr Mills and his team, they assured me everything was above board. They'd simply got caught in an organisational mix-up, the kind of thing that could happen to anyone, especially if they didn't have digital skills.

Only in this case it happened to an entire campaign, in the middle of the most consequential vote in post-war British history. I'd stumbled across a little piece of Brexit history, trapped by WHOIS in internet amber.

Giving it [the Electoral Commission] the ability to issue fines large enough to daunt multimillionaires would help, as would firmer controls over political advertising on social mediaRowland Manthorpe

In early 2016, the mood in the Leave camp was turning sour. Under Dominic Cummings' leadership, Vote Leave, which had started out as a cross-party operation, was becoming a Conservative operation. With figures such as Kate Hoey decamping to Leave.EU, Labour Leave's position was becoming unsustainable. Not just that, it was becoming unmanageable.

That was because Vote Leave controlled all of Labour Leave's resources, including its bank account, social media accounts and website. And, for four months, from January to April, it refused to give Mr Mills and his team access.

"I couldn't even access my email," he told me, the first time I called.

In late April, with the referendum two months away, Mr Mills's patience snapped. He formally split from Vote Leave and brought on an employee to build a new website. And he asked Leave.EU to help transfer the old website into his name.

Instead, the designer, who I was unable to contact, transferred it into her own.

When I told Mr Mills his old website was registered to someone with a Rock Services email address, he was surprised.

He'd asked Leave.EU for help, not Rock Services, or Eldon Insurance - the designer used a Rock Services email address, but listed herself on LinkedIn as an employee of Eldon Insurance.

All he'd wanted was a little technical assistance - "bits and pieces," he called it - while the new website, LabourLeave.org.uk, came online.

And that, Labour Leave explained, was that. Mr Mills wrapped up the assistance as a gift in kind, which he valued at £10,000 (mostly thanks to a loan of office space in Millbank Tower in Westminster), and included in Labour Leave's accounts to the Electoral Commission. Mystery solved.

"For the avoidance of doubt," a Labour Leave spokesperson told me, "there absolutely no coordination with any other campaign, and we have always cooperated openly, transparently and simply".

Image:LabourLeave.org was registered to a designer working for Arron Banks-owned Rock Services

Leave.EU gave the same account. In June 2018, Mr Banks told a committee of MPs in June 2018 that nobody worked for Leave.EU and Eldon Insurance - a statement he later changed to say that staff transferred on short-term contracts. Banks's right hand man, Andy Wigmore, told me over email that the designer was one of those contractors.

"Open Democracy, BBC Newsnight and the Guardian have all tried to find a smoking gun around this precise question Rowland and I'm afraid there isn't one, sorry to disappoint," Mr Wigmore said.

And yet. While there is nothing to suggest Labour Leave or Leave.EU were guilty of any wrongdoing - no "story" in the normal journalistic sense, which is why I decided not to publish the designer's name - the episode continued to nag at me. It bothered me over Christmas, and, as the Brexit debate spilled drunkenly across Westminster in the new year, it snagged in the back of my mind.

Partly, my concern was historical. In the accounts of the referendum, Labour Leave has gone largely unnoticed. (In The Uncivil War, Mr Mills makes only three appearances, one of which is in a fictional swimming pool).

Yet there is evidence to suggest it gave the Leave campaign crucial political cover.

Did voters being served what Mills describes as "a social media campaign very similar to the one adopted by Vote Leave, but specifically targeted to Labour-leaning voters" know Labour Leave was taking favours from the bankroller of UKIP? Would it have changed their mind if they did? What about the "army of 140,000 supporters" Labour Leave recruited to campaign in June?

At the same time, I was worried about the future. In the two-and-a-half years since the Brexit debate, investigation after investigation has confirmed the shadiness of the referendum campaign.

Image:Mr Banks also loaned staff from his companies to the Leave.EU campaign

Yet, despite the pleas of regulators and charities, nothing has been done to prevent a repeat. Meanwhile, the perma-campaign being waged between formal votes goes on almost completely unregulated.

Much of the debate since then has centred around the Electoral Commission's limited powers. Giving it the ability to issue fines large enough to daunt multimillionaires would help, as would firmer controls over political advertising on social media.

But unless they addressed the deeper sources of corruption, such reforms would inevitably be insufficient.

According to the Electoral Commission's rulebook for campaigners, "working together means spending money as a result of a coordinated plan or arrangement between two or more campaigners". That is, you can collaborate - sharing office space, for instance - as long as you don't spend money.

But data has zero marginal cost, and, online, there are plenty of ways to collaborate for free; not just with Slack or WhatsApp, but through sophisticated data-harvesting, or gaming of social media platforms, or forms of mutual cyber-surveillance.

Data spreads faster than money, too, and, even in these days of shell companies and offshore banking, harder to observe. Go to the WHOIS page for LabourLeave.org now and you'll find the registrant details have been scrubbed.

Where are the sophisticated powers needed to monitor its flow, not years later, but as it happens? Not because it breaches data protection laws, but because it confuses and bamboozles voters? Where are the networked institutions to match our networked politics?

Right now, they do not exist. Before I finished writing this, I went back to check some details in the Electoral Commission's rulebook. It didn't use the words "digital" or "technology" once.

Sky Views is a series of comment pieces by Sky News editors and correspondents, published every morning.